ians the Devil's
Tree, in accordance with their belief that all heathen rites were
offered to Satan. For it was beneath the Banyan that Vishnu was born,
and under it that Buddha taught his sacred lore; it is in it that
Brahmins love to dwell; it is the living, green cathedral of GOD--the
leafy cloister of sacred learning, ever holy, ever beautiful, never
dying. Like GOD and NATURE, it is ever re-born; it falls drooping to
earth to take fresh root, and is, on that account, as well as from its
immense size, a wonderfully apt symbol of God renewing himself--of
revival and of eternity. It is named from some saint, whose soul is
believed to flit through its solemn shades, nay, to animate the tree
itself: no wonder that in the laws of MENU it was made the sacred,
never-to-be-injured monument of a boundary.[1]

Time rolled on--for the world was old then, though thousands of years
have since faded--and from the East there was a mighty emigration to
lands far away. What were the causes of this mighty movement--what was
it which transplanted the seeds of new nations and new races into the
distant Norway and Sweden? As yet, only dim, very dim conjecture can be
made. The Mahabharata tells us of a mighty battle which sent forth
hero-sages with their armies into the wide world; others have traditions
of divisions between the worshippers of the Lingam and Yoni, who
alternately contended for the supremacy of the male or female principle
in creation. Whatever the causes may have been--priest warring with
soldier for power, or a newer and a milder code casting off the older
and more aristocratic rulers into outer darkness--one thing is certain,
that they went forth strong in faith, fearless of destiny; for the
religion of primeval times was terrible and tremendous. It was such
religion, such absolute, undoubting slavery to faith, which wore away
millions on millions of lives in carrying out in dim, old, barbarous
days the rock sculptures of the temples of Ellora--which dug Sibyls'
grots, and piled together Cyclopean walls, and pierced Cimmerian caves
of awful depth and solid gloom, in the fair isles of the Mediterranean;
and which, it may have been at the same time, it may have been at a
later day, massed together the miracles of Stonehenge, the enormous
dragon rows of Brittany, and the almost indentically similar serpent
mounds of our own West. They are all of one faith.

Westward went the AEsir--the children of Light--from the land of